WHAT NINA JAMES IS LIKE – 6 MONTHS

It’s the 29th of January, which means today Nina James turns a half a year old. As I type this post I struggle to accept that a whole 6 months has passed since Nina was in my stomach booting the living daylights out of me.

In the last 3 months a lot has changed with Nina and one of the best developments has been her laugh. She giggles a lot and out loud, it’s honestly one of the most amazing sounds ever and I’m not exaggerating when I say this. When she laughs it makes me feel like the happiest, funniest person on the planet. Man, if I got a reaction like that from anyone else, I would seriously consider a career in stand up comedy. Unfortunately though to get Nina to laugh hard, all you have to do is repeat the same word over and over AND over again and I’m not sure how well that material would go down at a comedy club. Oh well, at least I still have a good few years with Neens before she stops laughing at my ‘jokes’ and starts rolling her eyes!

At this stage she is also trying to talk, a lot of her vocab is pretty much an assortment of cooing, gurgles and made up noises and sounds, but damn it’s cute. Sometimes when she wakes up in the morning she’ll lie in her camcot and chat to herself for a while before she lets out a few yelps or as we like to call them our ‘morning call’. It’s the sweetest thing.

When we first bought Neens home she weighed 2,7 kgs, now she’s almost 7kgs and lovely and plump with cellulite in all the right places. If only normal cellulite yielded the same reaction baby cellulite does, the world would be a much happier place. Her thighs are like plump little pork chops and I have to stop myself from squeezing them all the time, I’m pretty sure if she could talk she’d tell me to quit with all the squeezing.

Her hair is still pretty short and light and not very full, but apparently I was exactly the same at her age according to my mom, so I’m not too concerned at this point seeing as I have what looks like a small Yeti growing on the top of my head. She has what my friend Jo affectionately calls an ‘Alabahma Waterfall’ a.k.a. a mini mullet at the back of her head. Nina has also started putting her one arm around our necks when we hold her and playing with the back of our hair. She loves doing that and she loves pulling it, it’s endearing and sore at the same time.

I think my most favourite thing that she has started doing is touching our faces, if you lie next to her or hover over her when she’s in her cot, she gently touches your face with both hands. It’s like she’s trying to figure out what these giant faces that stare at her all the time are all about. It’s the best.

She still sleeps through the night, with one wake up at about 2am for a quick feed, but every morning she’s up between 5:30 and 6am without fail. It’s taken some getting used to and Shane and I take turns playing with her so early in the morning, well I think Shane may be on this ride a little more often than me, but that’s because he’s awesome.

At the moment Nina is also carefully studying the art of Sitting, she lasts a little while before she bops over and then grabs whatever is closest to her and sticks it in her mouth. She chews on everything and loves sucking the outside of your glass if it’s cold and has ice in it. She also loves to stand, obviously we have to hold on to her because she’s not quite there yet, but she’s up on her pork chop legs all the time looking around to see what’s going on.

She’s amazing and she gets more amazing all the time. I often wonder what will be next with her and how excited we get whenever she does anything new and I mean we get excited about everything, just the other day she grabbed her feet and hung onto them and that yielded a video and a whole whatsapp conversation with both sets of grandparents. We’re looking forward to tons of those types of moments and more with Nina James, or as we like to call her (the latest in a never-ending supply of nicknames) “Nini my Nani”.